It would look like a Republican trolling Neshoba County Mississippi for r****t v**es in order to keep minorities from v****g.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan began his campaign, not with a speech on supply side economics. He began it with a speech supporting “states rights” just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi at the Neshoba County Fair, the very community where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. This was a deliberate appeal to white r****ts that he was on their side and was part of a Republican strategy going back to the 1960’s to build a conservative majority on the basis of r****m.

Situationally, conservatism is defined as the ideology arising out of a distinct but recurring type of historical situation in which a fundamental challenge is directed at established institutions and in which the supporters of those institutions employ the conservative ideology in their defense. Thus, conservatism is that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter. Conservatism in this sense is possible in the United States today only if there is a basic challenge to existing American institutions which impels their defenders to articulate conservative values.

The Civil Rights movement was a direct challenge to the existing institutions of the time, and
conservatism as an ideology is thus a reaction to a system under challenge, a defense of the status – quo in a period of intense ideological and social conflict.

The very notion of a race of people that was; at our beginnings as a country, only considered to be 3/5’s of a human being, now having equal footing with those that actually believed in this idea, is a direct challenge to a long held social concept. It denied the idea of w***e s*******y as legitimate. It’s surprising how many people still cling to this idea, and will go to extreme lengths to perpetuate it.

The idea that a person that could have been your s***e at one time, could today be your boss, or even President of the United States, is more than some people can deal with on an emotional level. W***e s*******y as an institution is renounced, discredited, and dismantled, and that is a major blow to an existing order, and conservatism is always a reaction to a challenge to an existing order. These are people that desperately need somebody to look down to in order to validate their own self-worth. “Sure, life is tough. But at least I’m White.” They can no longer rely on a policy that used to be institutionally enforceable. When that is removed by law, hostility is the result; hostility for those that have been emancipated by law and elevated to equal status, and hostility for the law itself including those that proposed it and passed it.

Thus, hatred for African-Americans and for the Liberal’s and liberal policies that endorse their equal status is fully embraced by the conservative.

Nice piece, adagio. BTW, my favorite of all musical scores is the Adagio in G Minor, by Albinoni.

In my experience, conservatives are merely concerned with maintaining the status quo of the values entrusted to them by their religion, group, or family. Anything less is a betrayal to those they love and respect. It is not like it seems, an unreasonably obstinate resistance to change, but an honoring of what was passed on to them. As stupid or illogical as some of their defenses and attacks may seem, it is a stubborn loyalty at the root.

I believe that conservatives are more honest, though not necessarily better-informed or wise. Remaining true to something like s***ery is commendable, after a fashion, yet this status quo is a stain. S***e-owners that for all apearances were decent and loving people, defended this practice not out of a belief that the s***e was not human but that those who handed down this practice were decent and loving people, their family and country.